Apparently, everyone is stepping towards Agile, DevOps, continuous integration/continuous delivery environment. Automation is, therefore, necessary to survive in such environments. Functional testing companies are playing a great role in building a strong testing environment while automating it. Whilst automation can ultimately help in achieving overall enterprise efficiency and application effectiveness, yet it can become a great disaster, if planning and analysis are absent.
Instead of working out a balanced testing strategy, a simple approach of ‘testing the product the same way a real customer would use it’ must be adopted. Functional testing can cost high and consume much time, if it is still done by manual means, rather than having automated testing procedures. While working on delivery of software projects, eventually you have to face a decision of which tests must be automated to reap a higher ROI (Return on Investment). Hence, in order to automate the functional testing, one must have a predefined road-map as well as strategy.
Choosing Automated Test Approach
For creating automated functional test, several methodologies exist;
- Modularity of tests
Under this approach, divides the software application under test into script units and modules. With the help of scripting language of the test automation solution, QA builds an abstraction layer in front of each component—in effect, hiding it from the rest of the application.
- Key-word driven testing
This approach is an application – independent framework that utilizes easy to understand “keywords” to narrate the operations to be performed on the application, under test. Keywords and actions are independent of both test scripts and automated testing solutions.
- Data Driven Testing
A testing framework which stores data in external files like a spreadsheet rather than hard-coding data into scripts of tests, is known as data – driven testing. With the help of this methodology, All the desired data values can be tested with a single test script.
- Playback/record testing
In order to capture tests, the need for scripting is eliminated. It begins with the recording of manual interaction inputs, with the application under test. These inputs which have been recorded are then used to generate automated test scripts that can be replayed and executed in the future.
Test cases which can be automated vs which can not be automated
| ✅ | ❌ |
| Repeatedly used tests | Exploratory Tests |
| Tests which delivers an exact result | UX Tests |
| Tests which clearly pass or fail | UI Tests |
| Tests which involve a lot of data entry | API Tests |
Conclusion
With the right planning and strategy, automated functional testing can revamp the software quality while verifying its accuracy and reliability at user end. Functional testing has made it possible for the Quality Assurance team and developers to now experience a speedy testing process which hence results in achieving higher Return on investment.
While planning tests, it’s essential to be cognizant of what sort of test data your tests may require. Most of the time, tests run against different environments which might not have the data you expect, that’s why make sure to build a test data management strategy in place.
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